Romfarer

En route to the Mun the Kraken escapes! ??? Drowsy and confused it makes a run for it along the Mun surface. Luckily Romfarer Corp is prepared for everything and shows up with a custom made Kraken Cage. After a few intense maneuvers and a hail of stun rockets the Kraken is finally captured and installed in its new home on the Mun.

The Kraken has been captured in high orbit around Kerbin. A unnamed spy satellite took these pictures shortly after the capture. It is rumored that the Kraken is currently being transported to a secret holding facility on the Mun. Stay tuned for more on this developing story. Disclaimer: I used the kraken model from The Official KSP 14.2 Celebration Pack! by OtherDalfite. The textures on it was broken so i had to re-make it.

Look what i put on the mun!

For the mun landing alone i usually just use one LV-909. That\'s enough for a safe return as well.

@Nom. A general rule when placing SRB\'s onto SRB\'s directly is that you have to connect each of them to something else, with a strut. For example. Place your middle SRB. Then place 2, 3, 4 or 6 SRB\'s directly on it. Then for each of these SRB\'s place a strut from it to the center SRB.

Call me crazy but i think it might be too much of a spoiler if i posted a picture of the earlier stages. :-X Anyways i rigged the craft for speed and here are the results. Top speed: 14,869m/s

Infinitum II breaks my old record. 8) Bill, Bob and Jeb landed 00:39:53 after takeoff. This time the spot i chose for my landing was solid. Perhaps it was less rocky. I will have to send out a mun vehicle to explore this QUICK SAND on the mun!!!

Can i use 1 pod, 1 FL-250, 1 LV-909 LFE and 3 LT-2 Landing Struts? After all that is enough to return from the mun and bring the crew back safely.

I landed my new craft 'Infinitum I' on the mun at 02:02:51. It would have been faster but the mun was NOT SOLID where i attempted to land first so i had to find another location. What is up with that? To the left of my craft you can see, 'breaking stage 2'. 8)

Hit CAPSLOCK for precision mode. And remember you can save/load the game with F5/F9. Much appreciated. It is also amazing how much the atmosphere brakes your craft down and how little fuel you need to make a landing. I made my first orbit with srb\'s only 8) they are my fav!

Bill, Bob and Jeb has already landed. 8) You will need more than 1 pixel to make it. I had about 3. And i can recommend hitting the 'brakes' at approximately 360 meters above the ground. And don\'t land in water, the rest of your craft serve as 0 shock absorber then.

3 brave kerbonauts make touchdown!!!!!

I wish they would lower the 70km limit to 60km as it is declining orbits above 60km that takes 'forever'. Riight, then it wouldn\'t decline at all...oh well..

As it turns out, orbits don\'t decline when you are not actually piloting your ship. And as everyone already know, you can only do 2x time warp below 70km. This means i cant watch it from another ship in higher orbit with higher time warp. I have to watch it decline at 2x speed. Together this makes up for a lengthy decline, my craft is still declining. I don\'t even think i have enough fuel.... How can i disable the time warp safety?

In a couple months when i have finished my Kerbal Interplanetary Defense System (oh dear acronym) i will send it back in time...wait, make that a couple more months. ??? THEEEEN i will send it back in time to this point and blow that thing out of the sky!!!

Haha, it looks like all your kerbonauts have discovered the fuel gauge! The way you describe this it sounds like you could only get one go at this, so i suspect this little tip may help: Hit F5 to save and F9 to load. Its even possible to save/load more games than the quicksaved ones by moving your sagegames/persistent files around...

Making orbit with the big tank on top makes it A LOT easier but as you can see from the scereenshot i have to make the orbit more fuel efficient to be able to land the craft. So my plan for this is to use the standard procedure then when i am leveling out the periapsis, make it just above 68km so it will require minimal fuel to get it back to a declining orbit, then make gravity/atmosphere do the job. And finally use a maximum burn (the SRB method 8)) to land the craft. I wonder how much fuel it will take.....

Why is mine yellow? I shall swap the order of the tanks. My crew are already experienced crash landers, however i doubt there will be enough fuel left. We will either need a parachute or some kind of big landing cushion to pull this off. ;D

What you dont believe me? I can do orbit with 13 SRB\'s 8) As for ascent profile, i use the following method: Start with full burn, make sure to hit CAPSLOCK to enable your manual SAS. Somewhere between 13 and 14km start your 'curve'. Basically start tillting your craft (to the right) towards a 90 degrees vertical axis (HDG) and 0 degrees lateral axis. This is the heading you want you craft to be traveling at orbit, somewhere above 68km. To execute 'the curve' correctly and speed efficiently you want to always have the craft direction arrow inside the yellow circle (the heading your ship is actually traveling). This way you loose the least amount of speed. When you are at 40km height, you want your craft to be traveling at approximately 30 degrees lateral. Then comes the tricky part. It is unlikely you will be traveling 0 degrees lateral at the point you hit 68km height. Therefore you have to cut your engines somewhere close to 68km. It is no point in using engines after 68km unless your picth is close to 0 degrees lateral. I usually drift at this point until the pitch of my craft is somewhere approximately 2-4 degrees lateral, then i make a full burn in the direction im traveling until the fuel is gone. At this point you want to have a speed close to or preferably above 2300ms. NOTE: This is the same maneuver you use to stabilize your orbits: At apoapsis, speed up in the direction you are traveling to elevate your periapsis. Sorry if i have stated the blatantly obvious...

I made orbit with apoapsis 118,321m and periapsis 74,689m. One FL-T250 tank and one FL-T500 tank + pod and the LV-909 engine of course. Having an ASAS module on any minimalistic challenge is a HUGE handicap and i never use that.

Thanks. The landing was complicated. Since i can only do a 25 sec full burn and the general idea is to end up at 0 speed within falling distance when the engine gives out, it is preferable to start out at a height where a full burn with nose straight up will do just that. However that is almost impossible with SRB\'s. My craft was going too slow so i had to time the initial burn, then flip the craft over and burn at a certain angle just enough to not loose too much vertical speed so i at the end could burn 90 degrees for the remaining time and end up with 0 speed just above the surface. Anwyays, even after hours of trying, it did not go exactly as planned.

I seem to have missread the description for this challenge: 'land it in a state that can take off and return to kerbal'. I guess i have to build a liquid fuel rocket. SRB\'s are such a pain....

So i completed the ' Get to the Mun with only solid rocket boosters' challenge and it turns out the landing was extremely fast as well. 8:12:15 Straight up, get dragged into muns gravity and BOOOM full SRB burn landing! ;D

I made it! All kerbonauts alive!

I crashed my 20 SRB craft into the Mun, does that count? Anyways, it is possible to make orbit around the Mun with SRB\'s only. However, the instruments we have may be too inaccurate. I had this problem when trying to make orbit around Kerbin with SRB\'s only. I\'d get the trajectory right but i had to do a lot of re-runs because i was not able to set the heading precisely at the horizon. Setting the heading for the Mun will likely require much more precision.